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Windows 11 compatibility checker will now tell you why you can’t upgrade

The PC Health Check tool has been updated at the weekend and it will now tell you why your PC may not be eligible for an upgrade to Windows 11.

When we used the tool last week we discovered that our two year old, self built PC was not eligible for an upgrade but we were left to guess why that was. Upon further digging we learned that fTPM on our AMD motherboard wasn’t enabled. Once it was enabled, we were off to the races.

But things are already getting confusing and that’s without including acronyms like TPM 2.0, and UEFI.

Microsoft’s director of operating system security, David Weston, tweeted about the update to PC Health Check Up at the weekend but it was a few of the responses to that tweet that interested us.

In one tweet a person asked Weston about a desktop running an Intel Core i7-6800K CPU to which Weston said the CPU is supported, except according to Microsoft’s own documentation, it isn’t.

We really need Microsoft to be clear about these things.

In fact, looking at Microsoft’s list of Windows 11 compatible processors, the oldest Intel Core CPUs we can see are from the 8th Generation. That generation of CPUs was launched in August 2017.

As for AMD, Zen 2 and Zen 3 CPUs are supported but older Zen hardware is not compatible.

Why are older CPUs not compatible with Windows 11? In a word, security.

The longer explanation is that TPM 2.0 is a hard requirement from Microsoft.

“The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is a chip that is either integrated into your PC’s motherboard or added separately into the CPU. Its purpose is to help protect encryption keys, user credentials, and other sensitive data behind a hardware barrier so that malware and attackers can’t access or tamper with that data,” Weston wrote in a blog.

“PCs of the future need this modern hardware root-of-trust to help protect from both common and sophisticated attacks like ransomware and more sophisticated attacks from nation-states. Requiring the TPM 2.0 elevates the standard for hardware security by requiring that built-in root-of-trust,” the director adds.

We highly recommend you check if your PC is ready for Windows 11 using the PC Health Check tool you can download at the bottom of this page.

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